Create your own client apps using SAS Integration Technologies

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This article contains supporting information for a SAS Global Forum 2013 paper, Paper 003-2013: Create Your Own Client Apps Using SAS Integration Technologies. Although a few years old, all of the techniques and examples continue to work with the most recent releases of SAS 9.4.

Abstract

SAS Integration Technologies allows any custom client application to interact with SAS services. SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office are noteworthy examples of what can be done, but your own applications don't have to be that ambitious. This paper explains how to use SAS Integration Technologies components to accomplish focused tasks, such as run a SAS program on a remote server, read a SAS data set, run a stored process, and transfer files between the client machine and the SAS server. Working examples in Microsoft .NET (including C# and Visual Basic .NET) as well as Windows PowerShell are also provided.

Online materials and examples

SAS Global Forum proceedings

The PDF version of the paper can be found here:

Hemedinger, Chris. 2013. Paper 003-2013: Create Your Own Client Apps Using SAS Integration Technologies, Proceedings of the SAS Global Forum 2013 Conference

PowerShell examples

I've written several blog posts that show how to get started with Windows PowerShell and SAS Integration Technologies.

In addition to these posts, I've shared source code for the examples on GitHub:

Microsoft .NET examples

A complete Microsoft Visual Studio project, implemented in the C# programming language, is available on GitHub.

SAS Program Harness (.NET Windows Forms app, hosted on GitHub)

The sample application supports these basic features:

Connects to a SAS Workspace session using a server that you define in a dialog window
Allows you to connect to a "local" instance of SAS -- no configuration required.
Features three windows: a program editor, a log viewer, and a listing viewer. (Does that seem familiar?)
Allows you to run a SAS program on a background thread, keeping the main user interface responsive
Retrieves the SAS log and listing output, and colors each line of output as appropriate (errors, warnings, notes, page boundaries)
Provides a simple Data Set viewer: open a data set from SAS library, apply a filter (WHERE= option)

You can also read this blog post, which describes the example and has generated many comments and discussions.